Wednesday, April 4, 2012

MARTHA

Lord if You had been there, my brother would not have died. Lord, You must have known if You went here, You would die. Lord, if You will it, even now You will not die. Why do You lie here cold and dead? Why did I dress Your broken body? Why were we not even given the chance to finish the burial rites before the Sabbath demanded that we part?

You were my friend, Lord, but I never could wrap my head around anything You said. It was one of the reasons it was easier to serve You at the table than to sit at Your feet.

We came to say goodbye. We came with our spices, our burial perfumes, to acquaint ourselves with the idea of You dead. It’s what I did for Lazarus once. I washed his limbs myself, and I wrapped his limbs myself, and I watched every second as they rolled the great stone into place.

I watched them hurried washing your body, fumbling with wrappings, fussing that there would be too little time. Too little time to get the stone in place before the Sabbath, before there would be no man willing to work at sealing the smell of the dead away from the living.

You need the time. To teach yourself how to live in a world where your loved one is not. You need to take in their dead body, the reality of their death, and feel the time continue passing. Yourself still living, breathing, growing older. To accustom yourself to living without them. Living in a world where they are dead.

Twice I did this. Twice when it was unnecessary. Your Magdalene, so strong, came rushing back to tell us: we did not have to accustom ourselves to Your death. Although later we did have to adjust to a world without You in it.

Twice in my life, I have thought I had to make a place for death, teach my heart how to survive its ravages. Twice in my life I have sat by a dead body and made myself accept it, made myself forge a self that could live without my brother or my Lord. And twice, You have shown me that it is unnecessary.

It is only a parting. It is only a temporary parting. It is only the first blink of sorrow the presages the reunion to come.